1. 2600 IS NOT DIFFERENT FROM BUGTRAQ, as each is open to anyone who wishes to participate in viewing it's material, and that material is written by nearly anyone who wishes to contribute.
I realize I'm repeating myself, but it IS different, because their intents are different. Intent is very relevant under the law, and I don't believe for a second that Bugtraq and 2600 have the same intent.
And some backwards places have crazy laws like "You cannot put an ice cream cone in your pocket". Just the other day I heard that some guy, under some stupid no-tolerence law, is spending 35-years-to-life for stealing a bicycle. A friggen $100 BIKE!
Are these people technically breaking the law? YES
Are these laws dumb and should be abolished? YES
Should these laws be challenged and brought to the Supreme Court? YES
And I don't deny that DMCA is a bad law, and I don't deny 2600 their right to appeal to higher courts. But it's not up to the lesser courts to decide which laws are stupid and which are good. Otherwise we wouldn't need laws at all. We'd just say "don't do anything that the judges think is bad."
We've already (hopefully) established that DMCA is brain-dead and should be abolished.
Yes, but that's not the same thing as establishing that a judge shouldn't abide by it.
IANAL, but "trade secret" and "patent" and "copyright" are all different flavors of what could generally be called "intellectual property", and each have their own ramifications. There is a trade-off in using "trade secrets" along the lines of "you don't have to announce it, but if somebody discovers it tough for you". (Is there a lawyer in the house?).
IANAL either, but I don't think you can officially license a trade secret. I think for DVD-CCA to be licensing CSS, that means it's copyrighted or patented.
This mentality of physical property is just what MPAA, et al., want to foist on the consciousness of the American people. They want us to think their enemies are all peg-legged pirates roaming some digital sea "stealing" and pillaging their intellectual property, depriving them of a product won by their hard work. It just doesn't work that way.
[sigh] I hate having to defend MPAA, but it kind of is like this. Imagine DVD-CCA spend money developing CSS, and nobody pays them to license it anymore because it's perfectly legal to use the open source version floating around out there? DVD-CCA takes a big financial hit that they didn't deserve. What if movie studios spend their 100 million dollars to make new hit movies, and everyone just downloads them from Gnutella? I know this is an exaggeration, and it's just the apocolyptic vision that MPAA is trying to conjure, but it has some element of truth to it. If you would have bought a DVD Player, but now you can get the open source one for free, then you have deprived the Player co. of money. When stuff like that happens, it discourages the Player co's and movie studios from producing product.
It should not be illegal to crack encryption, it should be illegal to pirate movies. Pirating movies is the problem, and that is the problem that should be dealt with. The fact that someone cracks encryption, or even has in their possession a tool for cracking encryption, does not mean they pirated anything!
I agree with the principle of "punish the crime, not the tool," but it's not that simple here. DVD-CCA developed CSS and licenses it, just like Microsoft developed Windows and licenses it to people. If you reverse engineer their tool and distribute the source code, you're violating their intellectual property.
I believe that the MPAA should go after people who actually pirated movies. That is my idea of common sense.
Yes, but judges aren't there to apply common sense, they're there to apply the law. It's true, no pirating was actually occurring, and MPAA was just conjuring this image of a future where all movies are pirated in order to show the court theoretical damages. That's bullshit. But legally MPAA was still right.
You're right that they earned their reputation, and I doubt they're ashamed of it. But this is a court of law! It is supposed to be objective Cases should be judged based on the facts, not on personal character.
Not true, personal character is often pivotal to a case, and intent was pivotal to this one. If they had been legitimate cryptography researchers and their intent was to analyze CSS to aid in further encoding schemes, then they would have been legally in the right. But if they were just a newsletter for hackers and skript kiddies, then they were legally in the wrong. The judge (and I) decided they were the latter.
Yeah, and he was wrong. The creaters of DeCSS have stated that the intent of the program was a step in creating a DVD player for the Linux operating system. That's not piracy, that's fair use.
What they've stated is not neccessarily the truth. The code was written for Windows, not Linux, which is why the judge was so skeptical. But even if that was their intent, it's still not fair use, it's infringment upon DVD-CCA's product (CSS) and violation of the DMCA.
I don't own a DVD player, but I do own some DVD's. I paid money for the content, for the film. Why make it illeagal for me to watch a movie I already paid for without spending more money on a 'licensed' player.
I've covered this before, but it was in another thread. You didn't pay for the content, for the film. I know that sounds stupid, but it's true. You do not own the information on that DVD. If you did, you could sell it to whomever you wanted, or edit in lots of swear words and broadcast it. What you paid for was the right to view the DVD in a manner consistent with a myriad of copyright laws and licensing agreements, and those laws and agreements say that you can't use an unlicensed player.
Is it? I thought the police upheld the law; the judge and jury decided if that law should stand? I believe the key phrases here are 'unconstitutional', and 'case law'.
No, the police just bring you before the judge. It's up to the judge to actually uphold the law. If the judge kept releasing criminals, it wouldn't matter that the police kept bringing them into court. Yes, it's also up to the judge to determine if a law is unconstitutional. I don't think DMCA is outright unconstitutional though. And the judge apparently agreed with me. That doesn't make him biased and it doesn't mean he's not doing his job. It just means that he saw it differently than you did. We'll see how the next judge(s) see it.
And yes, there were legitimate uses. The original reason the teenager over in Europe wrote this was to be able to watch the DVDs that he had bought. He didn't write it to copy DVDs, he just wanted to be able to watch that which he had bought on his Linux box.
Except that is not a legitimate use. To be legitimate, players must be licensed to decode CSS. It's much like writing a SNES emulator for PC, and using it to play SNES games that you own. Intuitively, this seems quite fair. You own the game, why can't you play it? But now you don't need to buy a SNES console, and the people developing the game in the first place were only licensed the information needed to develop because Nintendo wanted them to develop games in order to help sell SNES consoles. There is a legitimate financial framework involved, and by bypassing that you potentially deprive that company of revenue.
Then the Anarchist Cook book should also be illegal.
No, because there isn't (to my knowledge) a law that forbids the distribution of information than can be used to build explosives. There is however a law that forbids the distribution of information that is used to circumvent anti-piracy measures. If you want to argue the justice of that law, I'll agree with you. DMCA is unjust and should be repealed. But if you want to argue that it is unconstitutional, I disagree. It's not that simple. Speech has been restricted for quite a while, with copyright being on of the most significant restrictions. DMCA was founded in the spirit of copyright, meaning to implement neccessary measures to preserve copyright in the face of the Internet. Some say it goes to far. I say it goes to far. But it's not quite blatantly unconstitutional.
While it's refreshing to read a thoughtfull post such as this I think that it misses the fundamental reasons why people are so passionate about this topic. The law itself is flawed.
No, I didn't miss those reasons, I just didn't argue with them, because I agree with you. I agree that the law is flawed, but it's not blatantly unconstitutional, so it was the judge's duty to uphold it. Most people were arguing that 2600 should have won because they were legally in the right, and that because of that they will likely win on appeal. Most of them also claimed that the judge was biased and wrong in his failure to recognize the law. I'm merely trying to give these people a bit of perspective and make them realize that 2600 was legally wrong and that the judge was just doing his job. In the case of laws that are unreasonable but not outright unconstitutional, it's up to the Legislature to fix them, not the Judiciary.
Kaplan took a very narrow view of this situation in that he seems to be of the MPAA mindset by nature.
I don't see it that way. I got the impression from his statement that he recognized that moral ambiguity in the law, and he specifically pointed out that even still, it's his job to uphold it.
I do agree however that as this escalates, DMCA may take the beating it well deserves.
It's true that these are two different things. But the point is, they are both speech. If someone finds themselves with knowledge of how to defeat something, it is THEIR choice on how to handle it. It is not Xing's choice, it is not the government's choice. It is the choice of the person who has knowledge who to tell about it.
No, it's not that simple. 2600's only significant legal defense was that this was reverse engineering intended to aid reserach. Intent is key in that clause, and the fact that they posted it to a bunch of hackers instead of discreetly reporting it to Xing shows clearly where their intent was.
The free speech argument is definitely an important one, but free speech already has many restrictions in cases where free speech leads to uncontrollable situations, like inciting a riot. The distribution clause of the DMCA is in that same spirit, trying to prevent an outbreak of uncontrollable violation of the law. It goes too far, but it's not as clear and simple as "DMCA restricts speech so it's unconstitutional."
It is unfortunate that we have built a society where security through obscurity is so vital to the status quo that disseminating knowledge is punishable as a crime
I agree, this is unfortunate, and it's not the way things should work. But right now, it's the law, and that's what the judge is supposed to concern himself with.
1) 2600 didn't create the tool to bypass the encryption. Someone else did. Regardless, that's not the core issue of this case.
I didn't say they did. But by passing on that tool, they were still breaking the law.
2) The judge has now prevented 2600 from linking to DeCSS. That in itself is pretty questionable.
I agree. He interpreted it as "distribution." That was a bit of a stretch on interpretation of a clause in DMCA that already goes too far.
However, he is still a judge. He should be setting aside his personal biases towards 2600's reputation.
And how do you know he was personally biased? Intent is key to the case, so he has to decide what 2600's motives were in posting it. And he decided that those motives weren't the aid of encryption research, which was really the only thing that would have made it legal.
Yes, and as you pointed out already, there is a clause in the DMCA which specifically allows reverse engineering for interoperability purposes.
Yes, but the reverse engineering wasn't done to assess interoperability. That was one of the defenses used, and the judge didn't buy it. The fact that some people later used it to develop an illegal Linux player doesn't change the original reverse engineering. Plus, the key word is "assess," not "implement."
The encryption was a trade secret which is more or less fair game once the cat's out of the bag.
No, the encryption was intellectual property, like any copyrighted source code. The code to Windows 2000 isn't a "trade secret," and even if it was, you still violate the law by stealing that trade secret.
Best regards
= )
That was civil. Much better than the mindlessly blunt sarcasm used by another poster or two.
Third, I honestly think intellectual property, already under drastic assault by the web, is going to die. It simply is going to be too difficult to enforce. I don't think information wants to be free, but I do think that trying to prevent piracy of digital media will be impossible. As more and more people get broadband net access, the MPAA will face the same problems as the RIAA.
But that's not the point. Judges shouldn't ignore laws just because they're difficult to enforce. I think that the "war on drugs" is a perfect example of law enforcement assigned an impossible task. And I believe that drugs should be legal. But if I was caught with drugs in my posession, I wouldn't expect a judge to let me off because drug laws are hard to enforce.
Also, when most people say "information wants to be free," they don't mean that intellectual property is unjust and that information should be free to all. Some of them think that, but it's not what the phrase means. The phrase simply states that information tends to disperse, just like most energy systems tend toward entropy.
But the fact of the matter is you (and Judge Kaplan) are applying laws to the internet that were not designed with it in account.
No, the law being applied is DMCA, which was designed quite specifically with the Internet in mind.
It is not the judge's job to uphold the law if he or she decides that the law is in error. That's why the judicial system is an effective check against the other branches of government. Civil disobedience of the type practiced by 2600 and the authors of DeCSS has been shown historically (read: Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Thoreau) to be one of the best ways for individuals to make a difference in law.
LOL. I can't believe you're comparing 2600 to Ghandi and Martin Luther King.
But lousy comparisons aside, judges aren't allowed to decide whether or not a law is in error, only if it is unconstitutional. I personally agree that DMCA goes to far, and that distribution of material that is used to break encryption should not be termed illegal. Just like I don't believe guns should be illegal just because they can be used for murder. But it's not as cut-and-dried as "the Constitution gives us free speech, and DMCA restricts our speech."
The problem is that even the founding fathers decided to trim back on so-called "Free Speech." Long before DMCA it was accepted that yelling "Fire!" in crowded buildings, as well as speech intended to incite riots, or death threats, or copyright violations, are all illegal, despite being speech. So the problem with DMCA isn't exactly that it's unconstitutional, because free speech has accepted limits for a while now. The problem is that it takes copyright law farther than it was ever intended to go, and in doing so it treads on a few laws like fair use, as well as principles like "outlaw the crime, not the tool."
I agree that something needs to be done about the DMCA, as do many of the original supporters of it. But it's not as simple as declaring it to be unconstitutional.
Trade secret protection ceases to exist when you leave that trade secret out in the open for anyone to find. DVD CCA can properly sue Xing, but not the people who have the trade secret, they don't have a patent.
No, it's still their intellectual property. They leave movies out there where anyone can find them, but the movie studios don't lose control of them.
1. There are two legitimate licensed Linux players under development.
2. They didn't just develop a Linux player, they published DVD-CCA's intellectual property, the decoding scheme for CSS.
Licensing that tech is how DVD-CCA makes money. They worked to develop it, they're entitled to license it and make some money. Now one could argue that if they weren't going to license it to Linux developers, then they didn't lose anything by having it given to Linux developers. But first of all they WERE licensing it to Linux developers (developers who WON'T get busted, because they PAID for the right to use CSS) and secondly DeCSS wasn't just given to a Linux dev team, it was given to EVERYONE IN THE WORLD.
I've observed that some geeks tend to lose perspective with the outside world after spending too long in computerland. As I was reading this tirade, I was struck with the fact that Emmanuel is suffering drastically from this problem. Then I found that it wasn't limited to just him; almost all the posts on Slashdot went to the effect of "the judge is clearly biased, poor Emmanuel got shafted. Just another case of the Man trying to keep us down." PLEASE people, try to withdraw from your life on the net for a minute and think like normal people. Here, I'll work off his statements.
See, in my mind, this case has always been about common sense. Someone cracked someone else's badly protected encryption scheme. Game over. It's shot to hell. You don't continue to use bad encryption or pretend it didn't happen.
That's not at all what it's about. This isn't a crypto war. It's like someone robbed a bank, and told all his friends how to get past security, then got caught and tried to convince everyone that he's the good guy for revealing that the bank had bad security. The point is that it was illegal to crack the encryption, and illegal to distribute the tool for doing so. If anyone doubts that it was really illegal, check out the DMCA. And it was the judge's job to uphold the law. So when he saw some kids arguing "Sure, we broke the law, but it was really their fault because their crypto sucked ass." of course he treated them with contempt. Their few defenses were bullshit. Development of a Linux player? Well besides the fact that developing an Open Source Linux player would be drastically violating DVD-CCA's intellectual property, (they spend money developing CSS, and they get that money back through licensing) the code was developed in Windows. But wait, he has another defense:
So now we have this law that basically says we are not allowed to show people the failings of technology if the people controlling that technology decide they don't want us to.
No, not true. DMCA "Does permit the cracking of copyright protection devices, however, to conduct encryption research, assess product interoperability, and test computer security systems." They didn't just "show people the failings of the technology," they took a program to exploit those failings and distributed it. It's one thing to tell Xing "Hey, we found a crack in your security and reverse engineered your program." and quite another to build a tool to use that crack and distribute it to the public. 2600 wasn't aiding crypto research, they were distributing a tool that not only had no legal use, but its very existence was a violation of copyright laws and the DMCA. They were fighting a war with an opponent that wasn't even aware they were being attacked. It's not the corp's responsibility to have good crypto anymore than its your responsibility to wear Kevlar. If you crack their crypto, just like if you shoot somebody, you're breaking the law. The crypto is only there to assure them some protection from lawbreakers. So what's their next point?
Oh, and let's also point out that no matter how hard they try, nobody can wipe the paint off the wall.
The fact that they can't stop all the criminals doesn't mean you shouldn't stop any. It's pretty much impossible to completely prevent all murders, but that's no reason to legalize murder.
He goes on to complain about how he was treated unfairly due to 2600's reputation. They earned the reputation. They're subversives, plain and simple. They teach people how to break the law. He says that if 2600 wasn't able to post their tutorials on things like stealing domain names and intercepting cell phone calls, that those security holes would still be there. Maybe so, but I don't believe for a second that 2600 published that info in the hopes of aiding the industry. If they really wanted the holes closed, they would discreetly explain the problems to the companies responsible, not publish them to a huge public audience of hackers.
Another thing that bothers me is that it doesn't seem to matter in the least WHY DeCSS was written. The fact is that DeCSS was written to circumvent CSS and, even if that was done specifically to cure world hunger, in the eyes of the court, it was a violation of the DMCA.
Actually it does matter. As I've already quoted, the DMCA makes it perfectly acceptable to crack encryption for research purposes. But the judge looked at the situation and determined that that was not why DeCSS was written.
And ironic that none of us even HAS a DVD player.
I find that pretty ironic, but probably not the same way he does. I think that for people who cry out so much about their "right" to view a DVD on whatever they want, they haven't actually purchased even one legitimate player. No wonder they want the illegal Linux player.
Now I don't agree with the MPAA, (though I end up defending them a lot around here, since the average Slashdotter doesn't even stop to think for a minute before crying out that MPAA is some giant conspiracy headed by evil warlords seeking to oppress all of us poor netizens.) I think CSS is pretty stupid and I think that the DMCA goes too far. Hatch even admits that DMCA goes too far. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. But in the meantime, it's the law, and the judge isn't biased and stupid by upholding the law. That's his job.
Has anybody thought about the security issues?
One of the advantadges to fiber is that it is incredibly difficult to tap, and the tap can be easily detected. Is the same true of wireless optical? And is tapping even relevant? I would assume that in the case of the Internet, you've got Carnivore tapping you, but otherwise fiber lines can pretty much be assumed secure. In the case of private networks, anyone with the budget for wireless optical could probably come up with a good encryption scheme. But is there anything I've missed here in the tapping issue?
If a friend sends me his birthday pictures in eMail (and he makes LOTS of those), and I get a neat array of 20 mails 2meg each, I EXPECT to be served faster than 128kbps if my pipe allows it. This is one extreme. Another would be that youre subscribed to a few high volume mailinglists (say, securityfocus.*, and a few groups on onelist or egroups)... Not everybody is, but those who are want their conn to be able to keep up with the steady flow of mails coming in without overloading their POP3-box.
Well the answer to that is that email is really the wrong method for sending 40 megs of pictures. Email is designed to be a carrier of Ascii text messages, and that's what the infrastructure (clients, servers, connections, etc...) are designed to support. That's why most email servers have limits on the maximum size. I don't claim email is low priority, quite the opposite. But it should be low bandwidth, at least for a single user. If you aren't sending big files, then 20 Kbytes is a pretty good sized email. At 128kbps that takes just over one second to transfer. You said you would tolerate more than that in latency.
News is a similar story. It was really designed to transfer ascii text, and therefore to be a low bandwidth service. Now that binary groups are quite common, it has become a high bandwidth service for some. But for the ISP, it's probably a low priority service, because only a small percentage of their customers use newsgroups, or even know what they are.
Now I wasn't claiming that the DSL provider was in the right if they choked those services down. I believe that if you paid for 384k you should damn well get it. I'm just speculating on their reasoning for doing it. Assuming that they really did choke the bandwidth, and it wasn't just server load, then I bet this was the reason they did so.
In fact, I believe you are actually allowed to develop some type of CSS-DVD-player, but it's the actual distribution of such tools that is illegal.
Nope, fraid not. The DMCA"Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software."
That means you're not allowed to crack it, even on your own. Ironically though, the No Electronic Theft Act, of 1997 amends copyright law to "Exempt from criminal prosecution reproduction or distribution that is not done "willfully" or that constitutes small-scale non-commercial copying (copyrighted works with a total retail value of less than $1,000)"
So as I read it, you're actually allowed to pirate copyrighted material, as long as it's cheap and you don't redistribute it. But you aren't allowed to crack any "anti-piracy measures" in the process.
It sounds to me like what happened was that Bell decided that email and newsgroups were low-bandwidth services, and that nobody would complain if they got choked a little, so they throttled the speed down. This seems a good idea for home users, (who REALLY needs to fetch their email faster than 128kbps?) but when you have a full-fledged business, you need the bandwidth. So they got caught. Sort of.
I suspect however, that the Houston co won't be able to prove anything, because there are 500 factors that COULD be responsible for the slow speed, and their case will fail.
IMHO - if you can get it, go RoadRunner - i have yet to have problems and it has been three months on CounterStrike bliss!
I live in the Albany area, and have used Road Runner for a while now. I live in a house with three roommates, two of whom are hardcore geeks. We have recently subscribed to DSL, from a local provider, Speakeasy, and are comparing the services before deciding to unsubscribe from either service.
Road Runner has been decent, in the sense that it has been alternately horrible and wondeful. When it's working, it runs 200kBps-300kBps. (note, that's bytes, not bits. Meaning 5 seconds per MB, tops) This beats the pants off the DSL, which for a comparable price gives us exactly 60kBps all the time. However, RoadRunner has gone down rather frequently (I can't say for sure it was network outages vs. line problems, but it fixed itself after a couple hours, and regardless of the cause it was still a problem) and has recently been very unreliable, as far as speed is concerned. For the past week or two I've been getting mostly around the 5-25 kBps range.
I'm not going to say one is better or worse, but they serve different needs. The DSL has provided us with a much more reliable connection, and allowed us 4 static IP Addresses, as well as giving us access to functons like reverse DNS. This is much better for the hardcore geeks and businesses who want to run their own email, web, ftp, etc... servers. RoadRunner, on the other hand, is much faster. It is a beautiful solution to the home recreational surfer who wants to fetch web pages and files at high speeds, but who doesn't need reliability or advanced functions, like static IPs.
Mmmmm. Generally I've found that if you're asking if a license is legally enforcable, the person wishing to enforce the license is generally not the best person to ask.
I realize this, and I had to skim past a bunch of MPAA propaganda to get to that section, but if you'll actually read the section I posted, you'll note that they refer to a license with the DVD-CCA. Regardless of what you think of the MPAA, I don't really think they would just make that up. If you think they would, feel free to check it out and find a more reliable source that refutes my statement.
That is why charging "friends" to view the DVD you bought is illegal -- because it's against copyright law, not because it's against any type of license.
Yes, you're right, I admit that I was wrong to use the word "license" there. But the point that I mean to emphasize is that copyright law says that the movie studio retains ownership of the actual information, the actual movie, on your DVD. It seems incredibly intuitive that you have just bought a movie, but you haven't. What you bought was the right to view that movie under certain specific conditions. They don't need to state those conditions explicitly on the DVD, because those conditions are already a part of the law.
The other thing I find somewhat humorous is that it might very well be that since the DMCA was passed more recently than the Home Recording Act, and since Congress was aware of the Fair Use clause when it passed the DMCA, the the DMCA superceeds and overrides the Fair Use clause...
From the DMCA: States explicitly that "[n]othing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use..."
The reason the DeCSS boys got screwed is because they weren't creating DeCSS for Fair Use. They didn't want to make copies of DVDs for their own usage, because you can do that all ready. Make a bit-for-bit copy, and view it in the same legitimate player you normally use. The player will decrypt it, there's no need to decrypt it beforehand. They created it (if you believe the cries of their supporters) to aid in the development of a Linux DVD player. Well the judge didn't believe that, since they wrote it in Windows, and Linux didn't get mentioned until after they got busted. The other problem is that developing a Linux DVD player is also against the DMCA, because it is still an attempt "to circumvent anti-piracy measures." It might qualify as research, one of the exceptions to the DMCA, but then the Linux player itself would still be circumventing CSS, which would be illegal. The reason it's legal for Toshiba and Xing and all the legitimate DVD players to circumvent CSS is because they paid DVD-CCA for that right.
The problem is that in order to legislate technology effectively, one must understand it. Unfortunately most of the legislature (and for the matter the judiciary and executive) has a very limited understanding of technology. Hatch, one of the major proponents of DMCA has since seen what it has been used for, and has realized that it was a mistake. That clause "to circumvent anti-piracy measures" doesn't allow for the possibility that the anti-piracy measures might be circumvented for reasons other than piracy. CSS, the "anti-piracy measure" serves to inhibit more than just piracy, but DMCA still forbids circumventing it.
DMCA also makes it illegal not only to crack the encryption, but to aid in the cracking. Meaning not only is using DeCSS illegal, but posting it or distributing it is illegal. That's the part that bothers me, because there are tons of devices in the US that are used everyday to break the law, but which have some legal uses. They are not outlawed, because doing so would punish the legal users, and because that would be overkill. You're already punishing the crime, don't punish the tool too.
On March 14 Stephen King electronically released a novella, Riding the Bullet, in a format that was readable only by using designated electronic books or special software. Just three days later a plaintext version appeared on a Web site in Switzerland. Remarkably, the crackers troubled themselves to break the code even though Amazon and Barnes & Noble were offering the authorized version at no charge.
= )
I love that. It's beautiful.
That is the hacker spirit at its best.
"I cracked your copy protection, even though your product was being given away for free."
Actually, I think that was a quote from Lars, not the fans. It was his response to the earlier question "what is it about?" and the fans responded to this with "it's our music too." I happen to disagree with that last statement, music doesn't belong to the fans. But as other posters have already pointed out, legally it doesn't belong to the writers/singers/instrument players either. Morally, I believe it should, and that's where most people take issue with the record companies.
Everyone who makes the argument that the RIAA is not losing money from Napster and its ilk must be smoking crack.
No, that's not true. I personally use Napster, as well as Gnutella, as well as simple Windows copy functions to make copies of mp3s for songs I don't own. I then listen to them, and decide if I like them. If there's three or four songs on an album that I like, I delete the mp3s and buy the album. If not, then I have no intention of buying that album. The record companies certainly aren't losing money from me using Napster, because Napster doesn't prevent me from buying any albums, and it in fact helps to convince me to buy a few. On the other hand, there are people out there who used to buy CDs, but now they just pirate the songs off Napster instead. The people who argue that Napster isn't hurting the record companies are simply saying they believe there are more people out there like me than there are of the other kind. They aren't smoking crack. I can't say for sure whether they are correct, but it certainly strikes me as suspicious that the record companies haven't presented any evidence of damages to the courts, since that evidence would help their case immensely.
Radio is not free.
The comparison to radio is that radio is free to its listeners, just as Napster is. If people wanted to, they could record songs off the radio, just as users "record" songs off Napster. Their point is that Napster merely distributes copyrighted material, just like radio stations do, so they shouldn't be punished any more than radio stations for facilitating those copies. However, you have a point, which is that radio stations, unlike Napster, pay the record companies for a license. This is true, and it invalidates the radio-Napster comparison.
I hope you don't get modded down, because you make some good rational arguments here. I happen to disagree with a few of them, but they still deserve to be here.
He's right, it was well-written. It's also the first mainstream news I've seen in a while that correctly notes the distinction between "Napster distributes copyrighted songs" and "people can use Napster to search each one another's hard drives for music."
Another interesting note though, is that the article links to the No Electronic Theft Act, which says the following: The criminal copyright and trademark provisions in titles 17 and 18 of the U.S. Code are amended to:... Exempt from criminal prosecution reproduction or distribution that is not done "willfully" or that constitutes small-scale non-commercial copying (copyrighted works with a total retail value of less than $1,000)
Now wait a minute, doesn't that say that if I go out on Napster or Gnutella or what have you, and get copies of lots of copyrighted songs, that I am exempt from criminal prosecution? As long as I don't steal anything worth more than $1,000 (per work, right, not total value?) or willfully distributed these songs?
Is there a catch? Am I to be civilly prosecuted, instead of criminally? Or is there a new law (since 1997) that changes this?
Or can you really not be busted for piracy unless you willfully distribute or pirate more than $1,000 at a time? This is much like making it legal to own and smoke pot, merely illegal to be a pot dealer.
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1. 2600 IS NOT DIFFERENT FROM BUGTRAQ, as each is open to anyone who wishes to participate in viewing it's material, and that material is written by nearly anyone who wishes to contribute.
I realize I'm repeating myself, but it IS different, because their intents are different. Intent is very relevant under the law, and I don't believe for a second that Bugtraq and 2600 have the same intent.
And some backwards places have crazy laws like "You cannot put an ice cream cone in your pocket". Just the other day I heard that some guy, under some stupid no-tolerence law, is spending 35-years-to-life for stealing a bicycle. A friggen $100 BIKE!
Are these people technically breaking the law? YES
Are these laws dumb and should be abolished? YES
Should these laws be challenged and brought to the Supreme Court? YES
And I don't deny that DMCA is a bad law, and I don't deny 2600 their right to appeal to higher courts. But it's not up to the lesser courts to decide which laws are stupid and which are good. Otherwise we wouldn't need laws at all. We'd just say "don't do anything that the judges think is bad."
We've already (hopefully) established that DMCA is brain-dead and should be abolished.
Yes, but that's not the same thing as establishing that a judge shouldn't abide by it.
IANAL, but "trade secret" and "patent" and "copyright" are all different flavors of what could generally be called "intellectual property", and each have their own ramifications. There is a trade-off in using "trade secrets" along the lines of "you don't have to announce it, but if somebody discovers it tough for you". (Is there a lawyer in the house?).
IANAL either, but I don't think you can officially license a trade secret. I think for DVD-CCA to be licensing CSS, that means it's copyrighted or patented.
This mentality of physical property is just what MPAA, et al., want to foist on the consciousness of the American people. They want us to think their enemies are all peg-legged pirates roaming some digital sea "stealing" and pillaging their intellectual property, depriving them of a product won by their hard work. It just doesn't work that way.
[sigh] I hate having to defend MPAA, but it kind of is like this. Imagine DVD-CCA spend money developing CSS, and nobody pays them to license it anymore because it's perfectly legal to use the open source version floating around out there? DVD-CCA takes a big financial hit that they didn't deserve. What if movie studios spend their 100 million dollars to make new hit movies, and everyone just downloads them from Gnutella? I know this is an exaggeration, and it's just the apocolyptic vision that MPAA is trying to conjure, but it has some element of truth to it. If you would have bought a DVD Player, but now you can get the open source one for free, then you have deprived the Player co. of money. When stuff like that happens, it discourages the Player co's and movie studios from producing product.
It should not be illegal to crack encryption, it should be illegal to pirate movies. Pirating movies is the problem, and that is the problem that should be dealt with. The fact that someone cracks encryption, or even has in their possession a tool for cracking encryption, does not mean they pirated anything!
I agree with the principle of "punish the crime, not the tool," but it's not that simple here. DVD-CCA developed CSS and licenses it, just like Microsoft developed Windows and licenses it to people. If you reverse engineer their tool and distribute the source code, you're violating their intellectual property.
I believe that the MPAA should go after people who actually pirated movies. That is my idea of common sense.
Yes, but judges aren't there to apply common sense, they're there to apply the law. It's true, no pirating was actually occurring, and MPAA was just conjuring this image of a future where all movies are pirated in order to show the court theoretical damages. That's bullshit. But legally MPAA was still right.
You're right that they earned their reputation, and I doubt they're ashamed of it. But this is a court of law! It is supposed to be objective Cases should be judged based on the facts, not on personal character.
Not true, personal character is often pivotal to a case, and intent was pivotal to this one. If they had been legitimate cryptography researchers and their intent was to analyze CSS to aid in further encoding schemes, then they would have been legally in the right. But if they were just a newsletter for hackers and skript kiddies, then they were legally in the wrong. The judge (and I) decided they were the latter.
Yeah, and he was wrong. The creaters of DeCSS have stated that the intent of the program was a step in creating a DVD player for the Linux operating system. That's not piracy, that's fair use.
What they've stated is not neccessarily the truth. The code was written for Windows, not Linux, which is why the judge was so skeptical. But even if that was their intent, it's still not fair use, it's infringment upon DVD-CCA's product (CSS) and violation of the DMCA.
I don't own a DVD player, but I do own some DVD's. I paid money for the content, for the film. Why make it illeagal for me to watch a movie I already paid for without spending more money on a 'licensed' player.
I've covered this before, but it was in another thread. You didn't pay for the content, for the film. I know that sounds stupid, but it's true. You do not own the information on that DVD. If you did, you could sell it to whomever you wanted, or edit in lots of swear words and broadcast it. What you paid for was the right to view the DVD in a manner consistent with a myriad of copyright laws and licensing agreements, and those laws and agreements say that you can't use an unlicensed player.
Is it? I thought the police upheld the law; the judge and jury decided if that law should stand? I believe the key phrases here are 'unconstitutional', and 'case law'.
No, the police just bring you before the judge. It's up to the judge to actually uphold the law. If the judge kept releasing criminals, it wouldn't matter that the police kept bringing them into court. Yes, it's also up to the judge to determine if a law is unconstitutional. I don't think DMCA is outright unconstitutional though. And the judge apparently agreed with me. That doesn't make him biased and it doesn't mean he's not doing his job. It just means that he saw it differently than you did. We'll see how the next judge(s) see it.
And yes, there were legitimate uses. The original reason the teenager over in Europe wrote this was to be able to watch the DVDs that he had bought. He didn't write it to copy DVDs, he just wanted to be able to watch that which he had bought on his Linux box.
Except that is not a legitimate use. To be legitimate, players must be licensed to decode CSS. It's much like writing a SNES emulator for PC, and using it to play SNES games that you own. Intuitively, this seems quite fair. You own the game, why can't you play it? But now you don't need to buy a SNES console, and the people developing the game in the first place were only licensed the information needed to develop because Nintendo wanted them to develop games in order to help sell SNES consoles. There is a legitimate financial framework involved, and by bypassing that you potentially deprive that company of revenue.
Then the Anarchist Cook book should also be illegal.
No, because there isn't (to my knowledge) a law that forbids the distribution of information than can be used to build explosives. There is however a law that forbids the distribution of information that is used to circumvent anti-piracy measures. If you want to argue the justice of that law, I'll agree with you. DMCA is unjust and should be repealed. But if you want to argue that it is unconstitutional, I disagree. It's not that simple. Speech has been restricted for quite a while, with copyright being on of the most significant restrictions. DMCA was founded in the spirit of copyright, meaning to implement neccessary measures to preserve copyright in the face of the Internet. Some say it goes to far. I say it goes to far. But it's not quite blatantly unconstitutional.
While it's refreshing to read a thoughtfull post such as this I think that it misses the fundamental reasons why people are so passionate about this topic. The law itself is flawed.
No, I didn't miss those reasons, I just didn't argue with them, because I agree with you. I agree that the law is flawed, but it's not blatantly unconstitutional, so it was the judge's duty to uphold it. Most people were arguing that 2600 should have won because they were legally in the right, and that because of that they will likely win on appeal. Most of them also claimed that the judge was biased and wrong in his failure to recognize the law. I'm merely trying to give these people a bit of perspective and make them realize that 2600 was legally wrong and that the judge was just doing his job. In the case of laws that are unreasonable but not outright unconstitutional, it's up to the Legislature to fix them, not the Judiciary.
Kaplan took a very narrow view of this situation in that he seems to be of the MPAA mindset by nature.
I don't see it that way. I got the impression from his statement that he recognized that moral ambiguity in the law, and he specifically pointed out that even still, it's his job to uphold it.
I do agree however that as this escalates, DMCA may take the beating it well deserves.
It's true that these are two different things. But the point is, they are both speech. If someone finds themselves with knowledge of how to defeat something, it is THEIR choice on how to handle it. It is not Xing's choice, it is not the government's choice. It is the choice of the person who has knowledge who to tell about it.
No, it's not that simple. 2600's only significant legal defense was that this was reverse engineering intended to aid reserach. Intent is key in that clause, and the fact that they posted it to a bunch of hackers instead of discreetly reporting it to Xing shows clearly where their intent was.
The free speech argument is definitely an important one, but free speech already has many restrictions in cases where free speech leads to uncontrollable situations, like inciting a riot. The distribution clause of the DMCA is in that same spirit, trying to prevent an outbreak of uncontrollable violation of the law. It goes too far, but it's not as clear and simple as "DMCA restricts speech so it's unconstitutional."
It is unfortunate that we have built a society where security through obscurity is so vital to the status quo that disseminating knowledge is punishable as a crime
I agree, this is unfortunate, and it's not the way things should work. But right now, it's the law, and that's what the judge is supposed to concern himself with.
Which is worse? Having a security hole in your firewall but not knowing it? Or being blissfully ignorant because the vendor is sitting on its butt?
And which is worse, having that hole reported to your sysadmin, or having it posted on a website frequented by hackers?
Bugtraq is not the same as 2600. Intent is relevant to the law here, and 2600 has a very different intent than Bugtraq.
1) 2600 didn't create the tool to bypass the encryption. Someone else did. Regardless, that's not the core issue of this case.
I didn't say they did. But by passing on that tool, they were still breaking the law.
2) The judge has now prevented 2600 from linking to DeCSS. That in itself is pretty questionable.
I agree. He interpreted it as "distribution." That was a bit of a stretch on interpretation of a clause in DMCA that already goes too far.
However, he is still a judge. He should be setting aside his personal biases towards 2600's reputation.
And how do you know he was personally biased? Intent is key to the case, so he has to decide what 2600's motives were in posting it. And he decided that those motives weren't the aid of encryption research, which was really the only thing that would have made it legal.
Yes, and as you pointed out already, there is a clause in the DMCA which specifically allows reverse engineering for interoperability purposes.
Yes, but the reverse engineering wasn't done to assess interoperability. That was one of the defenses used, and the judge didn't buy it. The fact that some people later used it to develop an illegal Linux player doesn't change the original reverse engineering. Plus, the key word is "assess," not "implement."
The encryption was a trade secret which is more or less fair game once the cat's out of the bag.
No, the encryption was intellectual property, like any copyrighted source code. The code to Windows 2000 isn't a "trade secret," and even if it was, you still violate the law by stealing that trade secret.
Best regards
= )
That was civil. Much better than the mindlessly blunt sarcasm used by another poster or two.
Third, I honestly think intellectual property, already under drastic assault by the web, is going to die. It simply is going to be too difficult to enforce. I don't think information wants to be free, but I do think that trying to prevent piracy of digital media will be impossible. As more and more people get broadband net access, the MPAA will face the same problems as the RIAA.
But that's not the point. Judges shouldn't ignore laws just because they're difficult to enforce. I think that the "war on drugs" is a perfect example of law enforcement assigned an impossible task. And I believe that drugs should be legal. But if I was caught with drugs in my posession, I wouldn't expect a judge to let me off because drug laws are hard to enforce.
Also, when most people say "information wants to be free," they don't mean that intellectual property is unjust and that information should be free to all. Some of them think that, but it's not what the phrase means. The phrase simply states that information tends to disperse, just like most energy systems tend toward entropy.
But the fact of the matter is you (and Judge Kaplan) are applying laws to the internet that were not designed with it in account.
No, the law being applied is DMCA, which was designed quite specifically with the Internet in mind.
It is not the judge's job to uphold the law if he or she decides that the law is in error. That's why the judicial system is an effective check against the other branches of government. Civil disobedience of the type practiced by 2600 and the authors of DeCSS has been shown historically (read: Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Thoreau) to be one of the best ways for individuals to make a difference in law.
LOL. I can't believe you're comparing 2600 to Ghandi and Martin Luther King.
But lousy comparisons aside, judges aren't allowed to decide whether or not a law is in error, only if it is unconstitutional. I personally agree that DMCA goes to far, and that distribution of material that is used to break encryption should not be termed illegal. Just like I don't believe guns should be illegal just because they can be used for murder. But it's not as cut-and-dried as "the Constitution gives us free speech, and DMCA restricts our speech."
The problem is that even the founding fathers decided to trim back on so-called "Free Speech." Long before DMCA it was accepted that yelling "Fire!" in crowded buildings, as well as speech intended to incite riots, or death threats, or copyright violations, are all illegal, despite being speech. So the problem with DMCA isn't exactly that it's unconstitutional, because free speech has accepted limits for a while now. The problem is that it takes copyright law farther than it was ever intended to go, and in doing so it treads on a few laws like fair use, as well as principles like "outlaw the crime, not the tool."
I agree that something needs to be done about the DMCA, as do many of the original supporters of it. But it's not as simple as declaring it to be unconstitutional.
Trade secret protection ceases to exist when you leave that trade secret out in the open for anyone to find. DVD CCA can properly sue Xing, but not the people who have the trade secret, they don't have a patent.
No, it's still their intellectual property. They leave movies out there where anyone can find them, but the movie studios don't lose control of them.
Except what you're all missing is that:
1. There are two legitimate licensed Linux players under development.
2. They didn't just develop a Linux player, they published DVD-CCA's intellectual property, the decoding scheme for CSS.
Licensing that tech is how DVD-CCA makes money. They worked to develop it, they're entitled to license it and make some money. Now one could argue that if they weren't going to license it to Linux developers, then they didn't lose anything by having it given to Linux developers. But first of all they WERE licensing it to Linux developers (developers who WON'T get busted, because they PAID for the right to use CSS) and secondly DeCSS wasn't just given to a Linux dev team, it was given to EVERYONE IN THE WORLD.
I've observed that some geeks tend to lose perspective with the outside world after spending too long in computerland. As I was reading this tirade, I was struck with the fact that Emmanuel is suffering drastically from this problem. Then I found that it wasn't limited to just him; almost all the posts on Slashdot went to the effect of "the judge is clearly biased, poor Emmanuel got shafted. Just another case of the Man trying to keep us down." PLEASE people, try to withdraw from your life on the net for a minute and think like normal people. Here, I'll work off his statements.
See, in my mind, this case has always been about common sense. Someone cracked someone else's badly protected encryption scheme. Game over. It's shot to hell. You don't continue to use bad encryption or pretend it didn't happen.
That's not at all what it's about. This isn't a crypto war. It's like someone robbed a bank, and told all his friends how to get past security, then got caught and tried to convince everyone that he's the good guy for revealing that the bank had bad security. The point is that it was illegal to crack the encryption, and illegal to distribute the tool for doing so. If anyone doubts that it was really illegal, check out the DMCA. And it was the judge's job to uphold the law. So when he saw some kids arguing "Sure, we broke the law, but it was really their fault because their crypto sucked ass." of course he treated them with contempt. Their few defenses were bullshit. Development of a Linux player? Well besides the fact that developing an Open Source Linux player would be drastically violating DVD-CCA's intellectual property, (they spend money developing CSS, and they get that money back through licensing) the code was developed in Windows. But wait, he has another defense:
So now we have this law that basically says we are not allowed to show people the failings of technology if the people controlling that technology decide they don't want us to.
No, not true. DMCA "Does permit the cracking of copyright protection devices, however, to conduct encryption research, assess product interoperability, and test computer security systems." They didn't just "show people the failings of the technology," they took a program to exploit those failings and distributed it. It's one thing to tell Xing "Hey, we found a crack in your security and reverse engineered your program." and quite another to build a tool to use that crack and distribute it to the public. 2600 wasn't aiding crypto research, they were distributing a tool that not only had no legal use, but its very existence was a violation of copyright laws and the DMCA. They were fighting a war with an opponent that wasn't even aware they were being attacked. It's not the corp's responsibility to have good crypto anymore than its your responsibility to wear Kevlar. If you crack their crypto, just like if you shoot somebody, you're breaking the law. The crypto is only there to assure them some protection from lawbreakers. So what's their next point?
Oh, and let's also point out that no matter how hard they try, nobody can wipe the paint off the wall.
The fact that they can't stop all the criminals doesn't mean you shouldn't stop any. It's pretty much impossible to completely prevent all murders, but that's no reason to legalize murder.
He goes on to complain about how he was treated unfairly due to 2600's reputation. They earned the reputation. They're subversives, plain and simple. They teach people how to break the law. He says that if 2600 wasn't able to post their tutorials on things like stealing domain names and intercepting cell phone calls, that those security holes would still be there. Maybe so, but I don't believe for a second that 2600 published that info in the hopes of aiding the industry. If they really wanted the holes closed, they would discreetly explain the problems to the companies responsible, not publish them to a huge public audience of hackers.
Another thing that bothers me is that it doesn't seem to matter in the least WHY DeCSS was written. The fact is that DeCSS was written to circumvent CSS and, even if that was done specifically to cure world hunger, in the eyes of the court, it was a violation of the DMCA.
Actually it does matter. As I've already quoted, the DMCA makes it perfectly acceptable to crack encryption for research purposes. But the judge looked at the situation and determined that that was not why DeCSS was written.
And ironic that none of us even HAS a DVD player.
I find that pretty ironic, but probably not the same way he does. I think that for people who cry out so much about their "right" to view a DVD on whatever they want, they haven't actually purchased even one legitimate player. No wonder they want the illegal Linux player.
Now I don't agree with the MPAA, (though I end up defending them a lot around here, since the average Slashdotter doesn't even stop to think for a minute before crying out that MPAA is some giant conspiracy headed by evil warlords seeking to oppress all of us poor netizens.) I think CSS is pretty stupid and I think that the DMCA goes too far. Hatch even admits that DMCA goes too far. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. But in the meantime, it's the law, and the judge isn't biased and stupid by upholding the law. That's his job.
Has anybody thought about the security issues?
One of the advantadges to fiber is that it is incredibly difficult to tap, and the tap can be easily detected. Is the same true of wireless optical? And is tapping even relevant? I would assume that in the case of the Internet, you've got Carnivore tapping you, but otherwise fiber lines can pretty much be assumed secure. In the case of private networks, anyone with the budget for wireless optical could probably come up with a good encryption scheme. But is there anything I've missed here in the tapping issue?
If a friend sends me his birthday pictures in eMail (and he makes LOTS of those), and I get a neat array of 20 mails 2meg each, I EXPECT to be served faster than 128kbps if my pipe allows it. This is one extreme. Another would be that youre subscribed to a few high volume mailinglists (say, securityfocus.*, and a few groups on onelist or egroups) ... Not everybody is, but those who are want their conn to be able to keep up with the steady flow of mails coming in without overloading their POP3-box.
Well the answer to that is that email is really the wrong method for sending 40 megs of pictures. Email is designed to be a carrier of Ascii text messages, and that's what the infrastructure (clients, servers, connections, etc...) are designed to support. That's why most email servers have limits on the maximum size. I don't claim email is low priority, quite the opposite. But it should be low bandwidth, at least for a single user. If you aren't sending big files, then 20 Kbytes is a pretty good sized email. At 128kbps that takes just over one second to transfer. You said you would tolerate more than that in latency.
News is a similar story. It was really designed to transfer ascii text, and therefore to be a low bandwidth service. Now that binary groups are quite common, it has become a high bandwidth service for some. But for the ISP, it's probably a low priority service, because only a small percentage of their customers use newsgroups, or even know what they are.
Now I wasn't claiming that the DSL provider was in the right if they choked those services down. I believe that if you paid for 384k you should damn well get it. I'm just speculating on their reasoning for doing it. Assuming that they really did choke the bandwidth, and it wasn't just server load, then I bet this was the reason they did so.
In fact, I believe you are actually allowed to develop some type of CSS-DVD-player, but it's the actual distribution of such tools that is illegal.
Nope, fraid not. The DMCA "Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software."
That means you're not allowed to crack it, even on your own.
Ironically though, the No Electronic Theft Act, of 1997 amends copyright law to "Exempt from criminal prosecution reproduction or distribution that is not done "willfully" or that constitutes small-scale non-commercial copying (copyrighted works with a total retail value of less than $1,000)"
So as I read it, you're actually allowed to pirate copyrighted material, as long as it's cheap and you don't redistribute it. But you aren't allowed to crack any "anti-piracy measures" in the process.
It sounds to me like what happened was that Bell decided that email and newsgroups were low-bandwidth services, and that nobody would complain if they got choked a little, so they throttled the speed down. This seems a good idea for home users, (who REALLY needs to fetch their email faster than 128kbps?) but when you have a full-fledged business, you need the bandwidth. So they got caught. Sort of.
I suspect however, that the Houston co won't be able to prove anything, because there are 500 factors that COULD be responsible for the slow speed, and their case will fail.
IMHO - if you can get it, go RoadRunner - i have yet to have problems and it has been three months on CounterStrike bliss!
I live in the Albany area, and have used Road Runner for a while now. I live in a house with three roommates, two of whom are hardcore geeks. We have recently subscribed to DSL, from a local provider, Speakeasy, and are comparing the services before deciding to unsubscribe from either service.
Road Runner has been decent, in the sense that it has been alternately horrible and wondeful. When it's working, it runs 200kBps-300kBps. (note, that's bytes, not bits. Meaning 5 seconds per MB, tops) This beats the pants off the DSL, which for a comparable price gives us exactly 60kBps all the time. However, RoadRunner has gone down rather frequently (I can't say for sure it was network outages vs. line problems, but it fixed itself after a couple hours, and regardless of the cause it was still a problem) and has recently been very unreliable, as far as speed is concerned. For the past week or two I've been getting mostly around the 5-25 kBps range.
I'm not going to say one is better or worse, but they serve different needs. The DSL has provided us with a much more reliable connection, and allowed us 4 static IP Addresses, as well as giving us access to functons like reverse DNS. This is much better for the hardcore geeks and businesses who want to run their own email, web, ftp, etc... servers. RoadRunner, on the other hand, is much faster. It is a beautiful solution to the home recreational surfer who wants to fetch web pages and files at high speeds, but who doesn't need reliability or advanced functions, like static IPs.
Mmmmm. Generally I've found that if you're asking if a license is legally enforcable, the person wishing to enforce the license is generally not the best person to ask.
I realize this, and I had to skim past a bunch of MPAA propaganda to get to that section, but if you'll actually read the section I posted, you'll note that they refer to a license with the DVD-CCA. Regardless of what you think of the MPAA, I don't really think they would just make that up. If you think they would, feel free to check it out and find a more reliable source that refutes my statement.
That is why charging "friends" to view the DVD you bought is illegal -- because it's against copyright law, not because it's against any type of license.
Yes, you're right, I admit that I was wrong to use the word "license" there. But the point that I mean to emphasize is that copyright law says that the movie studio retains ownership of the actual information, the actual movie, on your DVD. It seems incredibly intuitive that you have just bought a movie, but you haven't. What you bought was the right to view that movie under certain specific conditions. They don't need to state those conditions explicitly on the DVD, because those conditions are already a part of the law.
The other thing I find somewhat humorous is that it might very well be that since the DMCA was passed more recently than the Home Recording Act, and since Congress was aware of the Fair Use clause when it passed the DMCA, the the DMCA superceeds and overrides the Fair Use clause...
From the DMCA:
States explicitly that "[n]othing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use..."
The reason the DeCSS boys got screwed is because they weren't creating DeCSS for Fair Use. They didn't want to make copies of DVDs for their own usage, because you can do that all ready. Make a bit-for-bit copy, and view it in the same legitimate player you normally use. The player will decrypt it, there's no need to decrypt it beforehand. They created it (if you believe the cries of their supporters) to aid in the development of a Linux DVD player. Well the judge didn't believe that, since they wrote it in Windows, and Linux didn't get mentioned until after they got busted. The other problem is that developing a Linux DVD player is also against the DMCA, because it is still an attempt "to circumvent anti-piracy measures." It might qualify as research, one of the exceptions to the DMCA, but then the Linux player itself would still be circumventing CSS, which would be illegal. The reason it's legal for Toshiba and Xing and all the legitimate DVD players to circumvent CSS is because they paid DVD-CCA for that right.
The problem is that in order to legislate technology effectively, one must understand it. Unfortunately most of the legislature (and for the matter the judiciary and executive) has a very limited understanding of technology. Hatch, one of the major proponents of DMCA has since seen what it has been used for, and has realized that it was a mistake. That clause "to circumvent anti-piracy measures" doesn't allow for the possibility that the anti-piracy measures might be circumvented for reasons other than piracy. CSS, the "anti-piracy measure" serves to inhibit more than just piracy, but DMCA still forbids circumventing it.
DMCA also makes it illegal not only to crack the encryption, but to aid in the cracking. Meaning not only is using DeCSS illegal, but posting it or distributing it is illegal. That's the part that bothers me, because there are tons of devices in the US that are used everyday to break the law, but which have some legal uses. They are not outlawed, because doing so would punish the legal users, and because that would be overkill. You're already punishing the crime, don't punish the tool too.
On March 14 Stephen King electronically released a novella, Riding the Bullet, in a format that was readable only by using designated electronic books or special software. Just three days later a plaintext version appeared on a Web site in Switzerland. Remarkably, the crackers troubled themselves to break the code even though Amazon and Barnes & Noble were offering the authorized version at no charge.
= )
I love that. It's beautiful.
That is the hacker spirit at its best.
"I cracked your copy protection, even though your product was being given away for free."
Really? What part? I don't see anything in the DMCA that makes it illegal to have copyrighted works that you do not own.
--
The real Slim Shady does not have a Slashdot id. But I don't know of any imposters.
"We have the right to control our music!"
Actually, I think that was a quote from Lars, not the fans. It was his response to the earlier question "what is it about?" and the fans responded to this with "it's our music too." I happen to disagree with that last statement, music doesn't belong to the fans. But as other posters have already pointed out, legally it doesn't belong to the writers/singers/instrument players either. Morally, I believe it should, and that's where most people take issue with the record companies.
Everyone who makes the argument that the RIAA is not losing money from Napster and its ilk must be smoking crack.
No, that's not true. I personally use Napster, as well as Gnutella, as well as simple Windows copy functions to make copies of mp3s for songs I don't own. I then listen to them, and decide if I like them. If there's three or four songs on an album that I like, I delete the mp3s and buy the album. If not, then I have no intention of buying that album. The record companies certainly aren't losing money from me using Napster, because Napster doesn't prevent me from buying any albums, and it in fact helps to convince me to buy a few. On the other hand, there are people out there who used to buy CDs, but now they just pirate the songs off Napster instead. The people who argue that Napster isn't hurting the record companies are simply saying they believe there are more people out there like me than there are of the other kind. They aren't smoking crack. I can't say for sure whether they are correct, but it certainly strikes me as suspicious that the record companies haven't presented any evidence of damages to the courts, since that evidence would help their case immensely.
Radio is not free.
The comparison to radio is that radio is free to its listeners, just as Napster is. If people wanted to, they could record songs off the radio, just as users "record" songs off Napster. Their point is that Napster merely distributes copyrighted material, just like radio stations do, so they shouldn't be punished any more than radio stations for facilitating those copies. However, you have a point, which is that radio stations, unlike Napster, pay the record companies for a license. This is true, and it invalidates the radio-Napster comparison.
I hope you don't get modded down, because you make some good rational arguments here. I happen to disagree with a few of them, but they still deserve to be here.
He's right, it was well-written. It's also the first mainstream news I've seen in a while that correctly notes the distinction between "Napster distributes copyrighted songs" and "people can use Napster to search each one another's hard drives for music."
... Exempt from criminal prosecution reproduction or distribution that is not done "willfully" or that constitutes small-scale non-commercial copying (copyrighted works with a total retail value of less than $1,000)
Another interesting note though, is that the article links to the No Electronic Theft Act, which says the following:
The criminal copyright and trademark provisions in titles 17 and 18 of the U.S. Code are amended to:
Now wait a minute, doesn't that say that if I go out on Napster or Gnutella or what have you, and get copies of lots of copyrighted songs, that I am exempt from criminal prosecution? As long as I don't steal anything worth more than $1,000 (per work, right, not total value?) or willfully distributed these songs?
Is there a catch? Am I to be civilly prosecuted, instead of criminally? Or is there a new law (since 1997) that changes this?
Or can you really not be busted for piracy unless you willfully distribute or pirate more than $1,000 at a time? This is much like making it legal to own and smoke pot, merely illegal to be a pot dealer.